Special Issue: Autonomous Systems and Knowledge Graphs

Over the past decade, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have gained popularity in mainstream software engineering and are now being exploited in large-scale socio-technical information systems. Increasingly, these systems are decentralised, comprise autonomous entities interacting with humans, and facilitate inter-organisational cooperative behaviour of varying complexity, in particular on the Web. Furthermore, these systems push the limits of current solutions, architectures, and frameworks that implement autonomous behaviour. Consequently, new theoretical and engineering challenges arise; e.g. serendipity of the interaction methods, heterogeneity in knowledge, data and assumptions, standards and protocol implementations, and the emergence of novel cooperation and normative mechanisms, to name a few.

Scope

This special issue seeks novel work that tackles theoretical and engineering challenges related to human and machine autonomy benefiting from KGs, including (but not exclusively):

• Architecture characteristics for autonomy exploiting KGs:
  • Openness, diversity, and heterogeneity
  • Serendipity and emergence
  • Control, trust, and reputation
  • Decentralised data management and querying
• Incomplete or conflicting knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions and KGs:
  • Reconciliation and negotiation mechanisms
  • Reasoning with conflicting, uncertain, and/or incomplete knowledge
  • Human augmentation of reasoning and decision making
  • Argumentation, dialogues, and narratives
  • Human-machine and machine-human persuasion
  • Human-machine reasoning explainability
• Human-machine social interactions and KGs:
  • Emergence of communication protocols through interactions
  • Legal and ethical technical foundations of Web-based autonomy
  • Governance, accountability, and explainability
  • Trust and Transparency
  • Representations of human agents versus genuinely artificial agents
  • Reasoning and learning / acting on the Web by example
  • Reasoning with disparity of capabilities
  • Regulating human-machine interactions
• Development platforms and frameworks for autonomy exploiting KGs:
  • Requirements for KG compliance
  • Reasoning with services, things, tasks, and capabilities
  • Autonomy in standards pertaining to KGs and the Web: challenges and limitations
  • Verification and testing of autonomous systems utilising KGs or the Web
• Use cases:
  • KGs for digital twins and distributed organisations
  • KGs for agents on the Semantic Web
  • KGs for agents in Web of Things-based use cases
  • Next generation of data infrastructure (e.g., cloud & edge computing, GAIA-X)

Guest Editors

• Timotheus Kampik, SAP & Umeå University
• Sabrina Kirrane, Vienna University of Economics
• Terry Payne, University of Liverpool
• Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool
• Antoine Zimmermann, École des Mines de Saint-Étienne

Timeline

• Submission deadline: August 31, 2024
• Author notification: October 31, 2024
• Revisions: November 31, 2024
• Author notification: January 15, 2025
• Publication: Q1 2025

Submission

Please follow the submission instructions for TGDK.

As a Diamond Open Access journal, official versions of accepted papers (as accessible via DOI) are published and made available for free online without fees for authors nor readers.